Bear Days: GoodLinks and Shortcuts and Bear
This post is part of the Bear Days series. Browse other articles here.
A single addition can sometimes alter an app's entire proposition. I used GoodLinks for several months, back in 2020, when I first started the Traces newsletter (1). Great read-later software, nice set of features, but I soon discovered Craft which quickly upended this—and many other— workflows. Then came Zettelkasten, PKM, Obsidian, Bear, etc. GoodLinks turned into another temporary experiment, frozen in time, filled with just forty-something curated entries all dutifully tagged "traces" (I'm nothing if not mildly organized when I want to be).
But just before the holidays GoodLinks received an honourable mention as part of MacStories' year-end roundups, and this bit caught my eye:
Earlier this year, indie developer Ngoc Luu added the ability to highlight passages of text in GoodLinks and (optionally) attach notes to them.
Now, the ability to highlight text while you’re reading in a read-later app isn’t new, but GoodLinks is the first app we’ve seen that combines this functionality with deep Shortcuts integration to process and automate your highlights. Like other parts of GoodLinks, there are native Shortcuts actions to find and open your highlights, get them as rich text or Markdown, and edit them. Not only is this a good idea from a data portability perspective (you can export and take your highlights with you as, say, a CSV or Markdown file), but it also creates countless possibilities in terms of connecting GoodLinks to note-taking apps, journaling apps, and more. Want to turn a highlight that struck you as interesting into a new entry in the Journal app? Thanks to Shortcuts, you can.
Highlights, notes, and Shortcuts…Hey kid? Meet toys, fireworks, and chocolate! I re-installed the app, paid the $6.99 CAD required to unlock the highlighting feature, and was off to the races. (2)
Since then, GoodLinks has completely upended the way I process articles that I wish to keep, and study further. Not by introducing new functionality, but simply by streamlining my existing process, and making it much more enjoyable.
To understand the appeal, I first need to explain the steps I usually follow:
Read the original article.
Save that article to a new Bear note (using Bear's Web Page Content from the Safari extension or Share sheet).
Run my Article Header shortcut (this formats the note by adding sections, fields for metadata etc)
Highlight the article in the new Bear note.
Save those highlights in a section at the top of the note for easy retrieval.
As I said, GoodLinks hasn't changed this process one iota. But it's made it vastly more convenient by eliminating a lot of tweaking, and back and forth: I now read and generate all the content I need within that single, dedicated app. There are several advantages to this:
It's a customizable viewer, so it can be set according to personal preferences (font, margins, spacing, etc). Reading is more pleasant, and consistent.
Highlighting doesn't involve going in and out of edit mode as it does in Bear (or Obsidian, etc). A small detail but it leads to less fiddling.
A nice perk: the app behaves differently depending on the tool being used. When highlighting text from a keyboard it displays a contextual menu, with highlight as one of many other system options. But when using a stylus (Apple Pencil or anything else) it directly highlights any selected text. Those other options are still accessible if you tap the highlighted passage, but this attention to detail makes the process quicker, and it feels much more natural—like a proper highlighter.
That said, it's the automation part that's made the most difference. GoodLinks is one of very few apps to offer context-aware actions: its Get Current Link action automatically passes data (and metadata) to Shortcuts from whatever article is currently selected. This removes the need for any complicated search or ID steps (3) when all you want is to process an article you're reading. The other feature that seals the deal for me is the customizable export template: with this you can choose exactly what to include, and how it'll be formatted (through Markdown). Combined, these features have allowed me to build a much faster, and richer, shortcut. Here's what that looks like in action:
With GoodLinks I'm getting a better annotating experience, along with an additional cloud-based repository for saved articles. Beyond those advantages, this approach also introduces a buffer where I allow highlighting to be more expansive. Think first draft, essentially. In the final Bear note I'll often drill down, and extract smaller excerpts—which'll potentially become Atomic Highlights.
Glad I'm back.
P.S I could also mention the way I've integrated Unread, and an ongoing Things Reading List into this workflow...but I'll keep that for another time.
P.P.S Here's my shortcut if you're interested in messing around: Article Header for Bear 2
1: Yes, it's These Traces. But "the These Traces newsletter" just sounds so, so wrong.
2: GoodLinks Premium isn't just affordable, it also uses a model that's very friendly: any features added during a user's subscription become permanent, even if you stop subscribing. The only other app I know of with a similar scheme is Agenda.
3: Things can do this as well, but it isn't common at all (unfortunately).
